I still remember how I felt when I read the first instalment of the ­Living with Teenagers column, which ran in the Saturday Family section of this newspaper for two years. I didn't take a breath until I'd reached the end.

The ­column was so good it was chilling – it was beautifully ­written, but also had a rawness to it, an honesty that was breathtaking. It was real. The writer was ruthless in her descriptions of herself – here was a mother who had no idea how to handle her children's tempers and tantrums, and who was bewildered by her conflicting feelings of exasperation, love and loss. And the teenagers!

From the very first episode they were living, breathing, three-dimensional people – appalling, sometimes, but also funny and vulnerable and charming.

The column had been commissioned by my co-editor Sally Weale, following a conversation in which a well-known novelist had remarked that she had never read an honest piece on raising teenagers.

As the mother of teenagers herself, the writer went on, she was endlessly reading accounts of what hard work it is raising babies and toddlers. But when it came to teenagers, silence. Why don't you write something, Sally had asked. And so she did.

By now, many people have concluded that the writer concerned is Julie Myerson. Since the controversy about The Lost Child, her book about her son's drug use, broke last week there has been constant speculation about whether she was also the author of Living With Teenagers. In the last few days, the internet has been alive with gossip. Today, Julie ­confirmed the rumours.

In a statement she said: "I wrote Living with Teenagers. I did so anonymously because I wanted to write truthfully, and that meant my children's identities had to be obscured. I never imagined at the outset that I would write more than a dozen or so columns but I continued for two years – through some very dark days – because of the support and appreciation I received from so many readers.

"Although the aim of the column was to offer an honest picture of family life, some incidents were partly fictionalised, some details carefully rearranged and some characters composites, to conceal the identity of our children.

To me, ­Living with Teenagers and The Lost Child are very different things: one a collection of affectionate vignettes that I hoped would strike a chord with many parents, and the other a ­serious description of what happens when skunk cannabis bursts into a home."

The identity of the Living With ­Teenagers author has been a closely guarded secret from its first publication in 2006. Both Sally and I promised that we would not tell a soul, a promise we have kept until today. No Guardian journalist outside the Family section knew the truth.

None of us – not Julie, or Sally or me – kept this secret to protect Julie from criticism. Our concern was that the children – "Jack", 14 when the column began, "Becca", 15, and "Eddie", 17 – should never find out about the column. The anonymity, we reasoned then, allowed Julie to be honest without hurting the teenagers themselves.

Did we have any misgivings about publishing the columns, back then, before the whole thing blew up last week? Yes. Both Sally and I felt uncomfortable about it on occasions. Reading each instalment was the highlight of our week, but sometimes I would find myself imagining how it would feel if I were "Becca" and had discovered that I had been exposed by my own mother in this way, and I would cringe. But all the time, we believed we could keep the secret; that the teenagers would never know.

And, always, offsetting any ambivalence we felt, was the extraordinary response from readers. From the outset, we received complaints. A minority criticised the writer for betraying her children's trust; some objected to the column on the grounds that it demonised teenagers; but most simply could not abide the teenagers' ­constant swearing.

But we received many, many more letters from readers for whom the columns resonated. Thank you, they said, for showing me I am not alone. Thank god that there are teenagers out there who are even worse than mine. The column was ­phenomenally successful because so many ­readers recognised their own families in it.

What we now know – but did not know then – was that the Myerson family was in the grip of a family crisis. Had I known that, I like to think that I would have put aside my editor's appetite for a great column, and advised Julie not to publish, directing her instead to people who might have been able to help them and their son.

As for Living With Teenagers, Julie's children did find out eventually, of course (how silly of us all, in hindsight, to believe that such a secret could be kept for ever). The column ended. "Jack", Julie's youngest, had his say in the paper. Julie begged her children's forgiveness. And many, many readers wrote in to say how much they missed the column, and how much it had helped them with their own difficult teenagers.

• Since the identity of the children in Living With Teenagers is now known, we have removed the columns from the Guardian website to protect their privacy.